Posts con el tag ‘strategy’

Hearing that the Associació Catalana de Comptabilitat i Direcció presented you with the award for academic excellence on Thursday was great news. This prestigious award comes in recognition of your valuable contribution to the world of finance and adds to the award received by Josep Angrill eleven years ago, also for his academic success at ESADE.

I will never forget the time I had the opportunity of being a student of yours. I think every one of the students you have taught would nominate you for this award. Many of your former students remember you as the professor who made it easy for us to make our way into the world of finance. And we did it in a fun and entertaining way, with highly innovative methods, in which you mixed the rigour of finance with your passion for mountaineering. Read the rest of this entry »

Many factors and people have contributed to ESADE’s milestones: our Board of Trustees, our faculty, our donors, our students, our alumni, our researchers, our management team and our staff. The members of our International Advisory Board (pictured above) are at the very top of this list. Read the rest of this entry »

Time, pressure and even stress, if handled well, can lead to great results, as demonstrated this week by four ESADE MBA students at the University of Vermont (USA), where they won the 1st Global Family Enterprise Case Competition. Joan Rigol, Banele Levin, Gloriann López, Filippo Checcucci and their coach, ESADE Professor Alberto Gimeno (pictured left), are an excellent example of teamwork.

Case competitions are a great challenge because they demand not only that participants think outside the box but that they do so as quickly and skilfully as possible. Joan, Banele, Gloriann and Filippo only had three hours to prepare each of the four cases and barely 20 minutes to present their results. Convincing the jury – a panel of renowned experts from the United States, Canada and Europe – was no easy task. The ESADE students were competing against 15 other teams of bright students from some of the best universities around the globe.

In their comments, the judges noted that the team’s innovative methodology – learnt in ESADE classrooms – was one of the main reasons for their victory. Congratulations to the MBA team for their achievement. We wish them many more to come.

On 16th February, ESADE’s Institute for Social Innovation hosted its 5th Annual Conference – without a doubt, an event of the utmost importance. The conference brought together hundreds of internationally recognised innovation experts to discuss how innovation and sustainability can be promoted in companies and organisations in order to address social and environmental challenges.

Consumers, interest groups and society at large are increasingly calling upon organisations for help in addressing social and environmental problems. As more and more companies and organisations have become aware of this, they are looking to CSR as a tool for reputation enhancement. The experts who spoke at the conference agreed that investment in innovation and social responsibility policies should not be seen as a cost but rather as a profitable investment in competitive differentiation. According to the experts, companies that promote sustainability and are not afraid to innovate will have greater chances of success in the 21st century. This is an encouraging thought, because it implies that being sustainable is not a purely altruistic act, but instead one that can become a key driver of growth to develop strategic business competencies.

As Ignasi Carreras observed at the conference: “If you do not take risks, you will never be innovative.” Companies, organisations and new entrepreneurs must learn to reinvent themselves. Our society needs more innovative leaders and pioneering initiatives capable of combining efficiency with a response to social and environmental challenges. If, as the experts said, sustainability is profitable, then this incentive could certainly drive change in order to build a fairer and more balanced world.

Events such as the Annual Conference of ESADE’s Institute for Social Innovation are highly important to society, because they shape the debate surrounding innovation – a key factor in ending the economic crisis and achieving sustainability, and a key driver to improve society and build a better world. Such events are also important because they promote inspirational ideas from theoretical as well as practical standpoints. What’s more, they help ESADE to fulfil its mission: inspiring and educating individuals and organisations to promote innovative, socially responsible forms of leadership in order to build a better future.

87% of the energy consumed worldwide comes from fossil fuels, a finite source of energy that will eventually run out. Renewable energies, despite efforts to invest in these in recent years, still account for a small percentage of global consumption. Aware of the need to promote debate about energy challenges, ESADE recently staged a workshop entitled The Coming Energy Market, which brought together a number of world energy experts from business, academic and organisational spheres to analyse the present and the future of the energy market. The initiative was organised by ESADEgeo, in collaboration with Aspen Institute, The Boston Consulting Group and KIC InnoEnergy.

The workshop opened with a debate about the technological challenges and the potential, in the medium to long term, of renewable energies, electricity storage, third and fourth generation nuclear energy, and shale gas. The experts agreed that renewable energies will play a key future role in ensuring a smooth transition when oil supplies run out. There is good news for the planet, insofar as renewable energies are of indisputable importance in the fight to prevent energy dependency and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I left the workshop feeling fairly optimistic; we have come further than one could have predicted some years ago, but there is still a lot to be done where energy is concerned. Renewable energies will be the long term commitment, but not the short or medium term, due to the investment they require.

In the session on the geopolitics of energy security, a panel of experts from China, India, Russia and the European Union discussed issues of great importance concerning global energy governance and access to energy resources. The workshop ended with a debate on the energy policy and regulatory framework in various parts of the world. I would echo the observations of our ESADEgeo president, Javier Solana, who closed the workshop with the following words: “Major technological changes are occurring and the economic crisis is diverting attention from the challenges ahead on energy ­– challenges that must not be underestimated.”

The International Energy Agency predicted that in the year 2035 renewable energies would represent 14.5% of world energy consumption. The European Union has set itself a slightly more ambitious target: to reach a 20% share of energy from renewable resources by the year 2020. The figures are encouraging, but we must continue to channel efforts towards increasing this percentage in the next few decades, if we are to avoid a situation in which the end of oil has serious consequences for the economy.